:date: 2017-01-05

=========================
Thursday, January 5, 2017
=========================

I continued to work on :ticket:`1189`. This ticket is advancing slowly
because our way of communicating.  The customer wants to increase the
foolproofness of their releases, so they ask to release to a testing
site first, which they review when I tell them that it is ready. Their
production site is running a Welfare version from January 2016. In
December 2016 they started to want some new features and asked me to
deploy a new version to their testlino. It took them some weeks to
test it and report a series of problems. It took me another few weeks
before diving back into this.

The first thing I did was an new upgrade of their testlino. This is a kind of
routine process where I simply pull the latest repository versions and then
restore a snapshot of their production data.  But last time I did this, I
obviously did a few migrations manually. So now I have to do them again (Lino of
course reminded me this in e.g. :ticket:`1353`). In order to avoid to do them a
third time in the future, I now wrote migrators for this.  Writing a migrator
takes a bit more time than doing it manually, but it has the obvious advantage
of being reusable.  Note that this advantage is only an advantage when
re-usability makes sense. All our production sites are currently in *development
mode* and therefore it is rather overkill to write migrators.  OTOH this is a
good test for *stable hosting* scenarios which are likely to come soon.